We know that #climatebreakdown presents an existential risk to human populations and much of the other life on Earth. Yet the gas guzzler still accelerates towards the cliff edge. Why? Thread ...
1. Because the lobbying power of fossil fuel-based businesses outweighs that of any other faction. The fossil fuel industry uses its profits to lobby for continued extraction and use. Its tactics are highly sophisticated.
2. Among these tactics is the use of covertly-funded front groups, denying or downplaying the risks, and granted a platform by a receptive media, much of which is owned by members of the same oligarchy. The media misrepresents both the problem and the necessary solutions.
3. This campaign of denial resonates with an innate resistance to change, reinforced by a tendency known as System Justification: a fundamental human weakness.
4. But deeper than any of this are the stories we tell ourselves: that progress means growth and growth means wellbeing. What #climatebreakdown and the rest of the environmental crisis reveal is that perpetual growth is the greatest threat to our wellbeing.
5. Perpetual growth was impossible until coal was widely used: before then, industrial expansion led to agricultural depression, breaking the cycle of accumulation (see EA Wrigley, Energy and the English Industrial Revoliution). So we came to see progress = growth = fossil fuel
6. We know what we need to do. Leave fossil fuels in the ground. Replace them in their entirety with cleaner energy technologies. Recognise planetary boundaries as the limits economic activity should not transgress. Set wellbeing as our goal, rather than growth.
7. This shift will not occur through buying different products or reducing the use of plastic bags, or any other form of voluntary consumer action, valid as these may be. It will occur only through political action.
8. What does this mean? Mobilisation on a massive scale, through groups such as 350.org, to put environmental breakdown at the front and centre of political life. We need to break through vested interests, denial and System Justification to force government action
9. This is the fight of our lives. Yet most people have not yet acknowledged it, let alone joined it. So all those of us who have done so have a duty to recruit: to break the awkward silence and talk about the subject other people want to avoid.
10. We need to get embarassing about it, to overcome our own reticence, even when we are labelled Jeremiahs or Cassandras, and risk upsetting people in alerting them to what is happening and what we need to do. theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
